Of Nebo and His Demons 01 Jul 2013 Font Size: a / A BEHIND THE FIGURES by Ijeoma Nwogwugwu ijeoma.nwogwugwu@thisdaylive In January this year, Professor Chinedu Nebo, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and more recently Federal University, Oye, Ekiti, gave a rather disappointing account of himself during his Senate confirmation as the prospective power minister. The professor, who I believe is a devout Christian, promised the Senate that the he would rout out the “witches” and “demons” in the power sector, who he claimed had constituted a mafia to deprive Nigerians of electricity. He said: “If the president deploys me in the power sector, I believe that given my performance at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where I drove out the witches and demons, God will also give me the power to drive out the demons in the power sector.” Despite the obvious warning signs, the Senate, which like most Nigerians cannot separate the ethereal from plain logic, the upper legislative chamber still made the unfortunate mistake of confirming the professor who did not seem to know that economic development does not call for the “casting and binding of demons” as a requirement. Well, the imaginary witches and demons that Nebo spoke of seem to have gotten the better of him, as six months after his confirmation, the professor has been underwhelming and has failed to seek out the spiritual forces that have conspired to keep Nigeria in the dark. But if truth be told, the problem with Nebo is that he hasn’t got the foggiest clue of how to manage the power sector. As Ejike Okpa, a foreign-based analyst summed him up a few months ago, Nebo, he said, came from an institution with less than $15m in annual budget. “He is a cold feet in corporate boardrooms, and may not articulate financial, legal and maximally productive arguments/scenarios to entice and appease, while appealing to investors to take Nigeria’s power sector seriously.” Add to this the fact that at a time when the heavens have opened up and ushered in the rains, thus increasing the volume of water required to power the turbines at the hydro-electric dams, Nigeria which in the recent past recorded improvement in electricity output between June and October, has this year been subjected to one excuse after the other. An assessment of the power sector shows that most of the challenges in the sector are man-made, not demonic. For one, the transmission grid has not been upgraded in lockstep with electricity output. As a result, each time there is some incremental increase in electricity generation, the transmission grid shuts down. But a bigger problem lies with the managers of the power sector, especially in the power ministry. For instance, one year after the Canadian firm Manitoba Hydro International signed the management contract to take over and manage the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), the Canadian company has still not been allowed to carry out its mandate and gets no support from the supervisory board of TCN which is more obsessed with awarding inflated contracts for the transmission network than ensuring that it functions at optimal capacity. What is worse is that the TCN board, which is chaired by Hamman Tukur, former Chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Allocation Commission (RMFAC), from the outset wrote a letter to President Goodluck Jonathan stating that he had no business reporting to Nebo. His preference was to report to Vice-President Namadi Sambo. The vice-president, for the record, has never been a fan of Manitoba and refused to lift a finger in his capacity as the Chairman of the National Council on Privatisation (NCP), when the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) and Ministry of Justice and Office of the Attorney General rode rough shod over the management contract and tried to get it terminated last year. On top of the problem of the transmission grid and its mismanagement is inadequacy of gas supply to the thermal power stations. This has remained an intractable problem, which the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation have consistently failed to address. Their usual refrain has been to blame the unattractive fiscal terms for gas development and the frequent shut down of gas facilities for routine maintenance by the oil companies. But the fact of the matter is that those in charge of the oil and gas sector are plainly incompetent; otherwise they would have insisted that the pricing of gas be made attractive and competitive in order to incentivise the oil companies to invest heavily in gas development for the domestic market. In the same breath, the scheduling of routine maintenance should be planned and carried out in a manner that it does not adversely disrupt electricity generation. That the petroleum minister Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke is tolerant of the indiscriminate closure of gas facilities for maintenance is indicative that she is not on top of the issues in the sector she superintends. Another factor contributing to epileptic power supply are the labour unions that have been shifting the goal post as far the settlement of workers’ entitlement is concerned. The union leaders who have been rabidly against the reforms and privatisation of the power sector have colluded with the management of the distribution and generation companies to sabotage the system. In their bid to hold on to their jobs, they have devised means to vandalise power facilities and frustrate the federal government’s effort to hand over the sector to the private sector. A bigger worry is that they have used the lack of budgetary allocation to the Gencos and Discos in the 2013 budget as the perfect fodder for their undertaking to deprive Nigerians of electricity. That Nebo has failed to deliver on Nigeria’s electricity challenges arises from the fact that he was appointed to manage a sector fraught with man-made conditions and situations that need effective leadership to tackle head on and cleanse. He has clearly shown that he was more effective in the classroom than he is at managing the power sector. The reason his predecessor Professor Bart Nnaji was disliked by those in the (vice) presidency and his power ministry was because he had the temerity to take on those who stood in the way of progress. And in his dogged determination to improve electricity supply, Nnaji partly delivered. It is unfortunate that Nebo lacks the same fighting spirit and has elected to blame factors some of us simply cannot identify with. Given his shortcomings, it is high time the president relieves Nebo of his misery so that he can head back to the classroom where he is better suited and can pontificate on witches and demons. The president can ill-afford to make mistakes with the power sector. He has too much to lose should the sector spiral out of control. He must step in and appoint a capable hand, who like Nnaji, will not be afraid to step on toes and can deliver Nigeria from darkness.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 21:25:30 +0000
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